AMERICAN LITERATURE - CHAPTER 5.2

What writing style did both Norman Mailer and James Jones employ?

Realism verging on grim naturalism, though not glorifying combat.

In which book did Joseph Heller cast World War II in satirical and absurdist terms?

Catch-22 (1961)

What was Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children’s Crusade? (1969)

Kurt Vonnegut’s antiwar novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces during World War II.

Out of Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, who was NOT from the South?

Arthur Miller

Who was Robert Penn Warren? (1905-1989)

Southern fugitive and the only person to win Pulitzer Prizes for both Fiction and Poetry.

What was All the King’s Men? (1946)

Novel focusing on the darker implications of the American dream, as revealed in an account of the career of southern politician Huey Long.

What was Death of a Salesman? (1949)

Story by Arthur Miller about man’s search for merit and worth in his life and the realization that failure invariably looms.

What is All My Sons (1947) about?

A manufacturer who knowingly allows defective parts to be shipped to airplane firms during World War II, resulting in the death of several American airmen.

What is The Crucible (1953) about?

The Salem (Massachusetts) witchcraft trials of the 17th century, in which Puritan settlers were wrongfully executed as supposed witches.

When was The Crucible staged?

In the early 1950s, during an anti-Communist crusade led by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and others.

What was Incident at Vichy? (1964)

Miller’s play about the Holocaust.

Which of Miller's poems is about two brothers who struggle to free themselves from the burdens of the past?

The Price (1968)

Who was Lillian Hellman? (1906–1984)

American playwright known for her fierce political activism and social dramas.

What were the names of Hellman’s two memoirs?

An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973)

Which scriptwriter did Hellman have a close personal relationship with for many years?

Dashiell Hammett

What was The Maltese Falcon? (1930)

Novel by Hammett that invented the American hardboiled detective story.

Why were Hellman and Hammett blacklisted in the American entertainment industry?

For refusing to name their friends and colleagues as Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Who was Tennessee Williams? (1911–1983)

Writer whose work focused on disturbed emotions within families, known for his incantatory repetitions.

What were Tennessee Williams’ two most popular works?

The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1949)

What was Katherine Anne Porter’s (1890–1980) first success?

The short story “Flowering Judas” (1929).

Where was Ship of Fools (1962) set?

In the late 1930s, aboard a passenger liner carrying members of the German upper class and German refugees alike from the Nazi nation.

What was A Curtain of Green? (1941)

Welty’s first collection of short stories.

What was “Why I Live at the P.O.” (1941)?

Poem about a stubborn and independent daughter who moves out of her house to live in a tiny post office.

What was the cultural stereotype in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit? (1955)

The faceless corporate man.

What assumption in the 1950s did most novels support?

That all Americans shared a common lifestyle.

Who was John O’Hara? (1905-1970)

Prolific writer known for his stories about outwardly successful people whose inner faults and dissatisfaction leave them vulnerable.

Who was James Baldwin? (1924-1987)

What is Invisible Man? (1952)

The story of a black man who lives a subterranean existence in a cellar brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a utility company.

How did Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) die?

From lupus, a blood disease.

How did O’Connor differ from many writers?

She held her characters at arm’s length, revealing their inadequacy and silliness.

What is Wise Blood? (1952)

Story about a religious fanatic who establishes his own church.

What is “The Displaced Person” (1955) about?

An immigrant killed by ignorant country people who are threatened by his hard work and strange ways.

Who was Saul Bellow? (1915-2005)

Russian-Jewish author who studied anthropology and sociology, which greatly influenced his writing.

"A failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, is so consumed by feelings of inadequacy that he becomes totally inadequate — a failure with women, jobs, machines, and the commodities market, where he loses all his money."

Which book does this describe?

Seize the Day (1956)

Who was Bernard Malamud? (1914–1986)

One of the defining 20th-century American Jewish authors.

What was Malamud’s first published work?

The Natural (1952)

For which book was Malamer awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award?"

The Fixer (1966)

“The Fixer” is based on which real-life trial?

Mendel Beiliss

What is Pale Fire (1962) about?

A long poem by an imaginary dead poet and the commentaries on it by a critic whose writings overwhelm the poem and take on unexpected lives of their own.

Who is John Cheever? (1912-1982)

Novelist known for his elegant, suggestive short stories, which scrutinize the New York business world through its effects on the businessmen, their wives, children, and friends.

Who was John Updike? (1932–2008)

Author best known for his five Rabbit books, depicting the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

What was The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger about?

A sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness.

What did the fall over the cliff in “The Catcher in the Rye” represent?

The loss of childhood innocence.

What is On the Road (1957) about?

About beatniks wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty.

What was The Armies of the Night? (1968)

Norman Mailer’s novel about a 1967 antiwar march.

What is In Cold Blood? (1965)

Truman Capote's riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the American heartland.

Where and when did Thomas Pynchon (1937–) graduate?

From Cornell University in 1958.

“A vast plot is unknown to at least one of the main characters, whose task it then becomes to render order out of chaos and decipher the world.”

Which author often used this plot in their works?

Thomas Pynchon

Which of Pynchon’s stories is about a failure who engages in pointless wanderings and various weird enterprises — and his opposite, the educated Herbert Stencil, who seeks a mysterious female spy, V?

V (1963)

What is The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) about?

A secret system associated with the U.S. Postal Service.

Who was John Barth? (1930–2024)

Author known for his on how a story is told, rather than in the story itself.

What is Lost in the Funhouse? (1968)

Collection of 14 stories meant to alert the reader to the artificial nature of reading and writing.

Who was Norman Mailer? (1923–2007)

American novelist, journalist, and co-founder of the New Journalism movement.

Who was Philip Roth? (1933–2018)

Author known for exploring the complexities of Jewish-American identity.

What happens in “Portnoy’s Complaint?” (1969)

A New York City administrator regales his taciturn psychoanalyst with off-color stories of his boyhood.

Who was Reynolds Price? (1933–2011)

A long-time professor at Duke University who Recalled the classical literary tradition of the old South.

Who was Walker Percy? (1916–1990)

Member of the southern aristocracy known for his first novel, The Moviegoer (l961)

Who was E.L. Doctorow? (1931–2015)

Author known for The Book of Daniel (1971), his critically acclaimed novel about the high human cost of the Cold War.

What was Doctorow’s Ragtime? (1975)

Historical novel set primarily in the New York City area between 1902 and World War I.

What is Doctorow’s City of God (2000) about?

A Christian cleric’s consciousness interweaves the city’s generalized poverty, crime, and loneliness with stories of people whose lives touch his.

Where was William Styron born and raised?

In the Tidewater area of Virginia.

What is the defining theme of Styron’s novels?

He sets individuals in places and times that test the limits of their humanity, often dealing with the doom of a beautiful woman.

What is Styron's acclaimed 1951 early novel, and what is its premise?

Lie Down in Darkness. It begins with a beautiful southern woman's suicide and works backward to explore the dark, destructive forces within her family.

Which Styron novel won the Pulitzer Prize?

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

What is the premise of Styron's Sophie's Choice (1979)?

It follows a beautiful Polish woman who survived Auschwitz but is defeated by its memories, specifically the trauma of having to choose which of her children would live and die.

What are the titles of Styron’s memoir and his collection of autobiographical fictions?

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) and A Tidewater Morning (1993).

What is Gardner's most popular novel?

Grendel (1971)

What was Gardner's stance on existentialism in his work?

His works subtly argue against existentialism, which he believed filled protagonists with self-destructive despair and cynicism.

What was the main argument of Gardner’s controversial critical book, On Moral Fiction (1978)?

He argued that novels should embody ethical values rather than dazzling readers with empty technical innovation, and criticized living authors who failed to do so.

Who is Joyce Carol Oates? (1938–)

The most prolific serious novelist of recent decades, famous for her “psychological realism.”

Who was Toni Morrison? (1931–2019)

Writer known for being the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

What is The Bluest Eye (1970) about?

A strong-willed young black girl tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who is driven mad by an abusive father. Pecola believes that her dark eyes have magically become blue and that they will make her lovable.

Who is Alice Walker? (1944–)

African American writer from a sharecropper family in rural Georgia, largely associated with feminism.

Who wrote an acclaimed cycle of plays about the 20th-century black experience?

August Wilson (1945–2005)

Who was Edward Albee? (1928–2016)

The most influential dramatist of the early 1960s, who brought new European currents into U.S. drama.

Who was Amiri Baraka? (1934–2014)

Poet known for supple, speech-oriented poetry with an affinity to improvisational jazz.

Where did Baraka live during the 1960s?

New York City’s Greenwich Village

What was the Black Arts Repertory Theater?

A landmark cultural institution founded in Harlem in 1965 by Amiri Baraka.

Who was Sam Shepard? (1943–2017)

Playwrights who wrote 58 plays and received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child.

How does Shepard’s writing differ from others?

He lets his characters guide his writing, rather than beginning with a pre-planned plot.

Who was David Mamet? (1947–)

Playwright know for his distinctive, rapid-fire, and often profane colloquial dialogue, frequently referred to as "Mamet speak."

What was American Buffalo? (1975)

A two-act play of increasingly violent language involving a drug addict, a junk store, and an attempted theft.